Coal ash is another thing entirely & considered too full of heavy metals that plants growing there can accumulate. Another good reason to use wood rather than fossil fuels!

http://forestry.oxfordjournals.....l/79/5/563

My neighbours seem to grow veg successfully in ground that appears to be mostly the waste from the last 200 years of coal fires! I have heard however that such waste can contain heavy metals so personally I would avoid it.

I use wood ash from my stove on my land but the main thing is that it is not old building wood as apparently wood from about the last hundred years can be treated with chemical nasties!

There is no nitrogen content to ash but it does have lots of goodies. I believe I read somewhere that it is best added when the growing season starrts as it may be fairly soluble. I stir mine into a watering can.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_ash

Hope this helps
Tony

And, from time to time as a last resort I may need to burn coal (sorry folks) in my new place until I can sort something better out. What would be the effect on soil of introducing the cinders etc from a coal fire? If this is inadvisable, can anyone think of a sustainable use for this stuff without having to take it away somewhere?

Advice would be welcome -thanks

Yes there seems to be a beautiful feedback mechanism that Gaia has used to keep a stable temperature, necessary for life to exist, on Earth over several billions years. As the sun has increased its heat (it’s supposedly 25% warmer now than when life began), there has been much less need for CO2 in the atmosphere to reduce radiant heat from the Earth’s surface. As the sun warms, increasing slightly the surface heat, more plant growth occurs, soaking up some of the CO2, allowing more heat to escape. This Carbon ultimately ends up sequestered in the soil. The system has worked beautifully until we started digging the carbon up again and releasing it back in the atmosphere again! DUH!

This article makes so much sense, let nature do what it is good at! There is also some interesting ideas about incorporating carbon into the soil giving homes for microbes, holding onto nutrients etc which also seems logical in that in nature there are fires which would naturally leave carbon pieces in/on the ground.

Great, so when’s it happening? We’ve had proper mechanisation on farms for over 50 years, yet I don’t see the equipment that can do a better job than natural systems in re-balancing the soil. And indeed, when oil gets too expensive or runs out, how will me make this equipment, let alone power it.

The urgency of the situation will soon be upon us. We need to encourage smaller families (there are too many people on the earth), we need to find better ways of living which work with nature not against it – we need to realise that natural systems have been working for hundreds of thousands of years, yet in the blink of an eye, mankind and destroyed so much.